The Odyssey - Homer

About the Book

Homer's epic tale of the journey of the Greek warrior Odysseus has been captivating readers for 2800 years. It tells of his many adventures and enduring love for his family as he tries to return home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Many translations have been made over the years, but Chapman's (1616) is particularly notable for its sinewy and gorgeous rendering. Chapman believed he was inspired by the spirit of Homer himself, and his resulting work matches the breadth and power of the original with its own complex and stunning idiom. Keats himself expressed admiration for Chapman's work in his famous sonnet, 'On first looking into Chapman's Homer.' This new Wordsworth edition includes accessible annotations and a detailed introduction that places the masterpiece in the context of its own day and discusses its influence on later poets.

About the Author

Homer

The two earliest surviving poetic works of ancient Greece, the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey' are attributed to 'Homer', but it seems likely that no such individual existed, the works being developed over an extended period of time until they achieved their final form in the 6th century BC. Whatever their origins, these epic poems were a major influence in the development of Greek culture.

Homer is a legendary ancient Greek epic poet, traditionally said to be the author of the epic poems the Iliad (the oldest work of Western literature) and the Odyssey. The ancient Greeks generally believed that Homer was an historical individual, but most scholars are sceptical. No reliable biographical information has been handed down from classical antiquity, and the poems themselves seem to represent the culmination of many centuries of oral story-telling and a well-developed formulaic system of poetic composition. According to Martin West, an internationally recognised scholar in classics, classical antiquity and philology, Homer is “not the name of a historical poet, but a fictitious or constructed name.”

The date, or indeed the fact, of Homer’s existence was controversial in antiquity and is no less so today. Herodotus said that Homer lived 400 years before his own time, which would place him around 850 BC. But other ancient sources give dates much closer to the supposed time of the Trojan War. The date of the Trojan War was given as 1194–1184 BC by Eratosthenes, who strove to establish a scientific chronology of events, and this date is gaining support in light of recent archaeological research.

For modern scholarship, ‘the time of Homer’ refers to the date of the poems’ conception as much as to the lifetime of Homer. The scholarly consensus is that the Iliad and the Odyssey date from around the eighth century BC, the Iliad being earlier than the Odyssey, possibly by some decades. Over the past few decades, some scholars have argued for a seventh century BC date. Those who believe that the Homeric poems developed gradually over a long period of time however, generally give a later date for the poems. On the other hand, according to Gregory Nagy, they became fixed texts only in the sixth century BC. Alfred Heubeck, the German classical philology scholar, states that the formative influence of the works of Homer in shaping and influencing the whole development of Greek culture was recognized by many Greeks themselves, who considered him to be their instructor.